brand strategy

How to Share Your Message With A New Brand Strategy?

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Brands fight to gain attention. Brands need communication without words. Brands are psychology and science brought together as a promise mark as opposed to a trademark.

Products have life cycles, but brands outlive products. Brands convey a uniform quality, credibility and experience. Brands are valuable.

Without branding, there is no differentiation. Without differentiation, there is no long-term profitability. People don’t have relationships with products, they develop relationships with brands.

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email engagement strategies

Up Your Email Engagement: Consumer-Oriented Strategies

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Email marketing may be one of the oldest forms of online marketing, but it has not lost its relevance. Despite the fact that many businesses are focusing more on social media marketing and SEO, email marketing should still be a priority for any online marketing strategy. The use of email can help you deliver valuable resources and promotional offers to your audience. However, it’s vital that you keep your leads engaged in order for your email marketing strategy to be successful. With that in mind, the following are a few tips to help boost email engagement.

1. Send Emails That Offer Value

The most important thing to remember when building an email marketing campaign is that your content matters. Poor content that offers little value to your recipients isn’t going to do anyone any good. Your emails have to provide value in order to engage your leads. There are two ways you can do this:

  • Provide Educational Content – Generally speaking, you should avoid sending too much promotional material through email. The more ads you send, the more likely your leads are to unsubscribe. As such, focus on creating content that is informative and helpful. Such content will help build your brand authority, thereby boosting brand trust. The more they trust you, the more attention they’ll pay to what you have to say.
  • Target Your Promotional Offers – Although you should focus more on educational content, that doesn’t mean you can’t ever promote your products or services. However, when you do email a lead a promotional offer, make sure that it’s relevant to their needs. Target your offers based on the data you have from them (such as purchase history) and the actions they take (such as the type of content they’ve downloaded in the past).

Email marketing continues to evolve with the times. Here is what to expect.

2. Segment Your Email Engagement List

It doesn’t matter how high-quality your email content is if it’s not relevant to the person you send it to. For instance, your email about what to look for in high-quality dog food isn’t going to be useful to a cat owner. Use the data you collect from your subscription forms to segment your email list. This will not only ensure that you send your emails to the relevant recipients, but also that you’re creating content that addresses every different part of your audience.

3. Personalize Your Emails

Personalizing your emails will make it easier for leads to relate and engage with your brand. Segmenting your email list will go a long way towards personalizing your emails. However, there’s more to do than just that. For instance, write in a more personal tone of voice using the second person. Use humor where appropriate. Also, send emails that are neither promotional nor educational every once in a while to celebrate a special occasion. For example, a personalized birthday email is always appreciated. You could also send out emails for specific holidays as long as they aren’t religious in tone.

4. Design Your Emails Effectively

The aesthetic of your email matters. You can’t just send a regular default text email to your leads and expect them to be intrigued by what you have to say. Use colors and images that are relevant to your brand and your content. Use CTA buttons that stick out. You can even add GIFs, which make your emails more visually dynamic and which will draw the eye. According to the results of a Dell email marketing campaign, the use of GIFs increased their click rate by 42 percent and their conversion rate by 103 percent.consumer email strategies

5. Send The Right Number Of Emails

This can be tricky to figure out. Send too many emails, and you may be marked as spam. Send too few, and your leads may forget about you. Generally speaking, it’s better to send too many than too few. Monitor your unsubscribe rate to get an idea of whether you’re sending too many. If you have a high unsubscribe rate, you may need to cut back on how often you’re sending out emails.

6. Track Performance And Optimize Your Email Engagement

Finally, analyze your email metrics to identify elements that are engaging and elements that are not. For instance, compare the performance of emails using images versus those that don’t. Compare the titles of your emails to see which results in a higher open rate. Use heat maps to figure out what parts of the email engage readers most. This information can be used to optimize future emails to boost engagement.

 

These are six effective methods for creating a more engaging email marketing campaign. The more engaged your email recipients are, the better your chances are of converting your leads into customers — and of converting those one-time customers into loyal long-term customers.

email marketing program

The Silent Generation & Senior Real Estate Marketing

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The Silent Generation…they were born between 1925 and 1945 and represent our aging population. According to a study done by the National Association of REALTORS®, they make up about 10 percent—the smallest segment—of the nation’s homebuyers and 16 percent of home sellers. But don’t be fooled, they still have significant buying power.

With a median age of 73, the Silent Generation consists of mostly retirees or those approaching retirement. As a result, their median household income is lower than other market segments. However, more than 30 percent have a household income of $85,000 or greater.
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inbound outbound

Newspaper Marketing in 2021 is Still Valid.. Here’s Why

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When thinking of a newspaper, you might think of a boy on a bicycle throwing rolled-up papers onto people’s yards. In other words, newspapers tend to conjure up images of the past. However, they are not a thing of the past, despite the fact that many people believe them to be. Not everybody has access to the Internet, which means the newspaper remains an important source of news for many people. As such, newspaper marketing remains an effective way to reach another target audience. If you’re not convinced that newspaper marketing is worth the cost, consider the following benefits:

Benefits of Newspaper Marketing:

  1. Reach A Bigger Audience – Did you know that despite the fact that newspaper readership is declining, the average newspaper reaches a larger audience than the average half-hour long prime time TV show? TV commercials are still considered an effective way to reach a big audience, which means newspapers should be considered as such as well.
  2. Reach A More Attentive Audience – You can reach a lot of people marketing on the Internet. More than you can through newspaper marketing — and by a large margin. However, the people you reach through a newspaper are much more likely to engage with your marketing materials, especially when compared to Internet users, whose average attention span is roughly eight seconds. The consumers who read the ad in a newspaper will be more engaged with the message involved.
  3. Newspaper Ads Live Longer – One of the challenges of marketing online is that you have to get your timing just right. If you post content to social media at the wrong time, your audience will miss it. When you advertise in a newspaper, your readers will get to it eventually. A newspaper audience will read through the newspaper when they have the time — which means they’ll see your ad eventually.newspaper marketing
  4. Fewer Competitors – A newspaper can only hold so many advertisements. Your competition (and direct competition) will not be nearly as strong as it is when you market your business online. This also means that your ads are less likely to be ignored because of ads and clickbait.
  5. Newspaper Advertising Is Affordable – It costs less to reach a thousand newspaper readers than it does to reach that many people through other means. On top of that, newspaper advertising tends to be very flexible, making it easier to customize your ads to meet your budget.

Why Should You Trust Newspaper Marketing?

  1. People Trust Newspapers – There’s a major trust issue in this day and age. People no longer trust what they see on TV or what they read online. And creating brand trust, as you know, is crucial. “Fake News” as it were, has caused significant doubt to be cast over the media landscape. However, people still trust newspapers — far more than any other type of media. This might be due to the transparency of the text with no puns involved. Because people trust newspapers, they’re more likely to take your advertising seriously.
  2. Newspaper Readers Look For Deals – Many people who subscribe to a newspaper actually go through the ads and coupons looking for deals. This means that the newspaper is a great way to advertise a special promotion or discount. Online platforms using this method are considered “spam”.
  3. Newspapers Provide A Tactile Experience – It may not seem like anything worthy of note, but the fact that your audience can touch the newspaper makes a big difference. Studies have shown that the ability to touch the ad increases the response rate. It’s obviously psychological, but it has an impact on the reader’s purchase intent and engagement. That tactile quality is missing from most other forms of marketing, whether it’s TV commercials, billboards, or any kind of digital marketing.

Newspaper advertising continues to be an important medium for marketing. Read more here.

Why Should You Consider Newspaper Marketing?

There are plenty of reasons why newspaper marketing remains an effective way to reach an audience, even in 2021. Although many businesses are focusing a significant amount of their resources on digital marketing, it’s vital that you consider all marketing channels, both online and offline. A balanced marketing strategy is the most successful strategy, after all. As such, be sure to consider newspaper marketing as part of your advertising strategy.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers
4 tips to keep sales & marketing on the same track

4 Tips To Keep Sales & Marketing On The Same Track

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Sales and marketing are usually thought of as being separate. However, with inbound marketing, both departments or teams need to work together to achieve their common goal: revenue. Inbound marketing is all about helping and informing the consumer throughout the various stages of the buying process, so they ultimately decide to purchase from you. This type of nurturing cannot happen unless sales and marketing work seamlessly. Here are 4 tips to keep your sales and marketing teams on the same page.

Keep constant communication

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homebuilder marketing

Home Builder Marketing Tips To Drive Traffic And Sales

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Any ad agency executive doing homebuilder marketing has undoubtedly heard these words from her clients, “we need more traffic.” And while there’s no magic bullet for homebuilder marketing that’s going to drive a specific number of visitors to a sales center in a given week, don’t underestimate the power of partnerships and focused events.

Drive On-Site Traffic With An Event

Recently, we harnessed the weight of one of our media partners to pull off a successful grand re-opening for a homebuilder in Chicagoland. With a property that has been underway for more than 10 years, we were looking for a way to reinvigorate the community and attract new people to the site. The builder was opening new models and we used that as our launch pad.

Learn How To Tell Your Partner’s Story

Capitalize On A Strong Media Partnership

With a limited budget, we partnered with a multimedia company with a local focus to develop a comprehensive marketing plan. The media mix spanned digital, print, email, and even public relations. For two weeks leading up to the event, we dominated suburban news pages online that covered the geographic area we anticipated buyers would come from. This included high-impact interstials, overlays and page takeovers. Click-thru results were four times that of our standard buy.

Target The Right Audience

Layered on top of the digital program was an email campaign, both to past prospects and a new audience. We targeted based on geography, household income, age, gender, and even propensity to buy a home. And we didn’t forget brokers with our homebuilder marketing. We emailed them, as well, and the sales team did “boots on the ground” networking, too.

Build Credibility Through Public Relations

Publicity also played a role in the success of our grand re-opening. A few weeks prior to the event an article appeared in print and online highlighting all the benefits of the community and promoting the reasons to buy as told from a homeowner’s point of view. Then the weekend of the event, a front-page feature—complete with photos—graced the cover of the homes section of the newspaper. The message, of course, enticed people to stop by and visit the brand-new decorated model homes.

Reap The Rewards

Results were amazing. Traffic during the grand re-opening weekend was nearly 10 times that of the community’s weekly average. And, even more importantly, the builder sold more homes in those two weeks than it had the five months prior.

Of course we can’t guarantee an on-site event supported by a strong media partnership will always garner these results. But in this case, it definitely was the right combination for a successful homebuilder marketing plan.

To learn more about how a strategic marketing program can increase traffic and sales at your communities, call Stevens & Tate Marketing at (630) 627-5200 or visit our website at stevens-tate.com.

DOWNLOAD OUR GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL TRADE SHOW MARKETING

Brand Reputation

Marketing Blog tips to Supplement your Digital Strategy

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Ask any business, big or small, and they’ll tell you how important digital marketing is to their overall marketing strategy. When it comes to digital marketing strategies, most prioritize social media, SEO, and email marketing. While these strategies can be very effective, it’s critical that you don’t dismiss the importance of maintaining a digital marketing blog. For many businesses, their blog isn’t nearly as big of a priority as other digital marketing elements. However, a digital marketing blog has an enormous impact on the overall success of your digital marketing efforts. In fact, a successful blog can have a huge impact on how effective your SEO and social media strategies are.

Why Maintaining A Digital Marketing Blog Is So Important

The following are some of the reasons why you should maintain a blog on your website:

  • Keep new content organized – Digital marketing requires regular content generation to be effective. A blog allows you to publish and organize all of your content in one place, making it easy for leads to find information that they’re looking for. Leads will also know where to go to find new content, keeping leads engaged.
  • Educate and nurture your leads – A regularly updated blog allows you to continually educate new leads and to nurture them through the buyer’s journey. The more informed your leads are, the more prepared they will be to make a purchasing decision in the near future.
  • Generate website traffic – Having a blog makes it easier to improve your website’s SEO. When you routinely publish relevant, highly optimized content on your blog, you’ll end up boosting web traffic. As a result, you’ll bring in more new potential leads.
  • Build brand authority – A blog full of high-quality content will help position your brand as an authority within your industry. The more you build your authority, the more brand trust you’ll create. It will also help you build your audience on social media as followers will be more likely to share your blog content with others.

Brand Storytelling Examples to Learn From

Tips For Maintaining A Successful Digital Marketing Blog

Now that you have a better understanding of why a blog is so vital to your overall digital marketing strategy, the following are a few tips to help you build and maintain a successful blog:

  1. Know who your audience is – If you don’t know who your target audience is, then you won’t be able to create and publish content that’s relevant. Two of the main goals of a content strategy are to build authority and attract new leads. Neither will occur without an understanding of who your audience is. Develop your buyer personas so that you know who your blog is for.
  2. Perform content research – Once you know who your audience is, you can figure out what kind of information they’re looking for. Do research on trending topics that are relevant to your audience. You should also look at the blogs of various competitors to see what type of content they’re publishing.
  3. Publish new blog content regularly – To maintain your audience, you need to publish new content on a regular basis. This means posting new content to your blog on the same days of the week, at the same times. Doing so ensures that your audience knows exactly when to visit your blog for new content, thereby helping keep your brand at the top of mind. Digital Marketing Blog
  4. Monitor the performance of your blog – Use analytics tools to track how your blog posts are doing. You can learn a lot about your blog content this way. For instance, what types of content get the most views, engagement, click-throughs, and conversions. This data is invaluable when it comes to adjusting your content strategy for success.

Keep Your Blog in the Front of Your Audiences Eyes

  1. Publish different types of content.– Make sure you vary the type of content you post so that you keep things fresh. In addition to written content, create and post infographics, SlideShares, and videos
  2. Keep your content interesting – It’s okay to post promotional content to your blog once in a while (such as a product announcement or a sale announcement), but it’s better to stick to educational content so that your blog doesn’t feel like a giant advertisement. However, this doesn’t mean your content should be purely informative. Your content should also be entertaining to keep your audience’s interest.
  3. Optimize your blog for SEO – Proper optimization through the use of high-quality internal and external links and relevant keywords will improve your chances of ranking. By ranking well, you’ll attract more traffic through Google and other search engines.
  4. Promote your blog – Don’t rely solely on SEO to attract an audience. Promote new blog content by posting links in your email newsletters and on social media. You can even use PPC ads to promote specific blog posts you want to showcase.

Building and maintaining a blog is essential to a successful digital marketing strategy. Be sure to use these eight tips to maintain a successful digital marketing blog on your website.

17 SEO Myths
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B2B Email Marketing

How to Incorporate Email Marketing into B2B Campaigns

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Email marketing has been a popular strategy for decades, and there’s no sign of it slowing down as an effective marketing tactic. However, as a B2B business, successful B2B email marketing can be challenging. When it comes to B2C email marketing, many companies simply use it to promote new products or to advertise special promotions. This won’t work with B2B marketing. Additionally, because most companies do embrace email marketing, you’re going to have to work a little harder to stand out from the competition and engage your leads. With that in mind, the following are a few B2B email marketing tips:

  1. Focus On Educational Content

Long-term relationships are much more important for B2B businesses than B2C businesses (although you can’t discount their importance to B2C companies either). As such, the bulk of your email content should focus on providing your leads with information that is useful to them. The more informed they are about the problems you solve or about the industry you’re in, the more comfortable they will be making a buying decision down the line. Not to mention that you’ll position yourself as a brand authority that they can trust.

B2B Email Marketing

  1. Personalize Your Emails

Don’t make the mistake of assuming email personalization starts and stops with addressing the lead by name. Personalization goes way beyond that. Use the information you have on your subscribers (gained from opt-in forms, questionnaires, purchase history, and more) to segment them into different lists. You can then target specific subscribers using content that is relevant to each list. Doing so will increase the chances of engagement and will make it easier to nurture your leads.

  1. Use Automation

As mentioned, automation can be used to segment your email list to ensure that your email content is personalized. However, automation can be used in a variety of ways to further boost engagement. For instance, you can set up email triggers based on actions your subscribers take. When they download something from your site, make a purchase, or sign up for a webinar via one of your emails, it will trigger a relevant email to be sent right after the action was taken.

You can schedule emails using automation to be sent at specific times and on specific days. This allows you to reach your users based on when they are most active on their email accounts.

Find Out How Marketing Automation Can Help You

  1. Embrace Drip Email Campaigns

Email drip campaigns consist of a chain of emails designed to follow one another in a specific order and on a scheduled timeline. Usually, a drip campaign will consist of around five emails sent at 3 to 5-day intervals. They are effective because they build on one another, thereby ensuring relevance and generating more engagement. Drip campaigns are designed to welcome new leads, educate them, and finally to encourage a purchase.

  1. Don’t Spam Your Subscribers

Even if you’re not sending overly promotional emails, you don’t want to overdo it. Your emails may be chock-full of useful and informative content, but if your recipients are receiving it on a daily basis, they’re going to start ignoring you. When that happens, it will be more difficult to reach them with content that they would actually find helpful. Some subscribers may even unsubscribe, resulting in lost leads.

  1. Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers

Every once in a while, take the time to identify subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails for some time. Don’t just assume that they are a lost cause. While some may have lost interest, others may simply have forgotten about your brand. Send out re-engagement emails that give these subscribers a reason to re-engage with you. Such emails can include polls and surveys, which can help you identify why they became unengaged in the first place. You can also use special offers based on their purchase history to generate interest in your business again.

  1. Market Your Email Subscriptions

For your B2B email marketing campaign to be successful, you need to have leads to actually email content to. Besides having email subscription forms on your website, you should actively promote your email subscriptions on your blog and on social media. You can even gate some of your long-form content (such as ebooks and whitepapers), requiring leads to sign up to your email list in return for access to your content.

B2B email marketing can be an incredibly effective way to engage and nurture leads. Make sure to keep these 7 tips in mind for a successful email marketing camp

25 Website Must Haves
b2b email marketing

6 Email Marketing Tips (Expert’s Advice)

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Millions of people have email accounts. Email marketing is a popular form of marketing still today. When sending emails, it is important to make sure it looks good. It is important because people receive many emails a day. In order to have your email opened and read, it needs to stand out. Here are 6 email marketing tips.

1) Right person, right time

Before sending an email, it is important to determine who the audience is of the email. Segment your contacts by buyer personas. This way you know who each group of your contacts is and what emails they should be receiving. Make sure you are sending out your emails at the right time. It is best to determine what time the people you are reaching are most likely to check their emails.

2) Content

Content is highly important and has so much value. If an email doesn’t have value then it shouldn’t be sent to people. A good way to determine if your email has value is to ask the question, “Would I be excited to read this email?” If the answer is yes, then the email has value.

3) Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with prospects with the goal of earning their business when they are ready. This process involves a series of emails. With lead nurturing, the goal is to turn a lead into a customer. Email marketing is a great way to nurture leads.

The Right Lead Nurturing Strategy Can Help You Stay Top of Mind 

4) Title

The title is what the people are going to read first. Usually, if the title is interesting and eye catching, the email will be opened up. If the title is boring, it will be passed over and not opened. Therefore, the title needs to be attention grabbing and interesting so that the email will be opened.

5) Personalization

Make sure each email you send it personalized. By personalized I mean at the beginning of the body of the paragraph, include “hello” followed by the person’s name who is receiving the email. What this does is that instead of the person being on an email list and just another name getting an email, it is directed specifically to that person and that person will most likely be more pleased with the email they are receiving.

6) CTA

Emails are a great place to include a CTA or call to action. By including a call to action with a link to relevant information regarding the email, you are providing a link back to your company website.

As you can see, these are just a few tips to help emails. These tips can help you execute some great emails to those people you are trying to reach. Something to remember, whenever you receive an email, think, “What is good and bad about this email?” That way you can evaluate emails.

email marketing program

types of marketing videos

Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Use

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Year after year, video marketing grows in importance. Video has never been easier to consume for Americans, especially when considering the increasing quality of smartphones and tablets. Video is also the easiest way for people to absorb information. Additionally, according to a prediction by Zenith Media, the average person will spend around 100 minutes a day watching videos in 2021. The pandemic certainly had an impact on these numbers as well. People have more time on their hands to watch video content, especially those who have switched to a work-at-home environment. Because of this increase in video consumption, a video marketing strategy is an absolute must. The following are some of the different types of marketing videos that you should consider producing this year.

1. Educational videos

Educational videos should be used to help inform your audience about a particular subject. No video marketing strategy will be successful without them. This is because the more informed your audience is, the more confident they will be in making a purchasing decision down the road. Educational videos provide them with the knowledge they need to understand your business and the solutions you offer. There are several types of educational videos, including:

  • Demo videos – Videos that demonstrate how your product or service is used.
  • Explainer videos – Videos that showcase why your product or service is needed.
  • How-to videos – Videos that provide step-by-step instructions on how to do a specific task.
  • Animated videos – Animated videos are a fantastic way to deliver information in an entertaining way, whether they’re explainer videos or how-to videos.

2. Interview videostype of marketing video

Interviews are an excellent way to provide detailed information about certain subjects to your audience while also providing a personality to engage with. You can film interviews with both employees and upper management as well as experts that are relevant to your industry. What’s great about interview videos is that they are incredibly easy to produce.

3. Event videos

Certain events, like industry tradeshows, conferences, fundraisers, and round table discussions, can reveal a wealth of information. Film these events and edit them into event videos for your audience to enjoy.

Leveraging Video Marketing During COVID-19

 

4. Case study and testimonial videos

These types of videos focus on customers and their experiences using your product or service. Not only can you use them as social proof that your products or services work, but they make it easier to build trust with your audience. Potential customers are much more likely to relate to and believe what previous customers have said, after all. Using case studies and testimonial videos, you give customers the chance to explain what their challenges were and how your product or service solved those challenges.

5. Behind-the-scenes videos

A big part of creating a successful brand identity is presenting your company as being relatable. You don’t want your audience to think of you as a big faceless corporation, after all. Creating videos that depict your company behind the scenes is a great way to do this. It shows that there’s a human element behind the business. There are tons of ways to go about creating behind-the-scenes videos. A video of the day-in-the-life of the typical employee or a video of the manufacturing process of a product are great examples.

These are five different types of marketing videos you should consider creating in 2021. As you develop your video marketing strategy, remember that the quality of your content matters — and so does the audience that you’re creating it for. Always keep viewers in mind to ensure that your video marketing efforts are relevant.

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